Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Winstonm]

I'm beginning to think the future of American democracy lies with the hope that the conservative judges being rammed through confirmation are more committed to the law than to the party. If party sycophants control the courts, who is left to enforce the laws?

 

To be effective, laws require two things: 1) a willingness to enforce, and 2) an ability to enforce. What we are seeing now with the president's refusal to allow the Treasure Department to release his tax returns is a blatant defiance of law. The issue now is whether or not there is a a genuine mechanism and willingness to enforce that law.

 

Any argument against Congress's ability to obtain tax returns is ludicrous as the reason for the law's creation was to allow Congress to investigate political corruption, bribery, and abuse of power.

 

The issue now is whether this country will allow a sitting president to refuse to comply with the law.

[Winstonm]

Speaking of the president's tax returns, it seems to me the only two reasons to be truly frightened about their release would be if the cash expenditures (for things like the Scottish golf course, for which cash was paid) do not agree with income. That would tend to show either income tax evasion or money laundering, would it not?

 

 

Edit: Big story in the NYT about the taxes of Individual-1.

 

David Cay Johnston says this about the story:

 

There is not now and never has been verifiable evidence that Donald Trump has ever had a billion dollars,” he continued. “What we know from public records and his actions and now this report in The New York Times is that money flows in and it flows out faster than it flows in. “

 

“And one of the reasons we should all be concerned about that is someone in search for money to maintain the appearance that they’re wealthy is likely to commit crimes and be open to various actions and one of the things has been looked at — we don’t have a definitive answer — Donald Trump laundering money for Russians, Saudis, Emiratis and others through real estate deal, some of which I have written about, that make no sense as a business deal, but absolutely make sense as money laundering and pay off operations,” he explained.

[y66]

Guest post from Paul Krugman:

 

If you’re trying to understand why we may be on the brink of a full-scale trade war, with a huge expansion of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods and, inevitably, Chinese retaliation, it may help to remember what happened a few weeks ago, while Notre Dame was burning.

 

As you may recall, Donald Trump decided to tell French firefighters how to do their job, tweeting that they should use “flying water tankers” to douse the flames. The French civil defense department responded with a tweet — in slightly fractured English — that didn’t mention Trump, but pointed out that water-bombing could cause the entire cathedral to collapse.

 

What does this have to do with trade? What the water-bombing incident shows us is that Trump has strong opinions on everything, even when he is completely ignorant of the subject. Fortunately, when it came to French firefighting, he couldn’t turn those opinions into action. Unfortunately, when it comes to trade policy, he can: U.S. trade law gives the president enormous discretionary authority to impose tariffs.

 

Trump’s tweets over the past few days may well be featured in future economics textbooks as perfect illustrations of how people misunderstand the basics of international trade and trade policy. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee it, since I’m the co-author of two textbooks.

 

First, Trump is still saying that because we run a $500 billion trade deficit with China — it’s actually $379 billion, but who’s counting? — that means we lose $500 billion. As some economists quickly pointed out, by this logic we all lose when we go shopping at our local supermarkets. After all, do the supermarkets buy anything from us in return? No!

 

Second, Trump keeps asserting that China is paying the tariffs he has already imposed. This could be true, if tariffs were driving Chinese prices down; in fact, the threat of more Chinese tariffs on U.S. agricultural exports is one reason grain prices have just plunged to a record low.

 

But enough time has passed for economists to look at the actual results of Trump’s trade policy so far, and the Chinese are not, in fact, paying the tariffs. As I wrote a couple of months ago, “to a first approximation, foreigners paid none of the bill, U.S. companies and consumers paid all of it.”

 

So if you’re trying to make sense of what’s happening on trade, you should start with the basic point that Trump has no idea what he’s doing, that there isn’t any coherent U.S. policy goal.

 

That still leaves the question of why what seemed to be a deal in the making may have fallen apart (or maybe not: this could all be theater.) Last week it looked as if China would mollify Trump by offering some “tweetable deliveries” — promises to buy U.S. products that would let him claim victory without leading to any substantive change in Chinese policy. Did the Chinese actually, as the administration claims, start to walk back some of their promises? Did a trade hard-liner get Trump’s ear? Did Trump hear that the likely deal would probably be panned by the news media? Nobody knows.

 

One thing is certain, however: If we do get into a full-scale trade war, for whatever reason, it will be very hard to end it, and the world economy will never be the same.

That also still leaves the question of why presumably rational people continue to support this guy.

[Winstonm]

Guest post from Paul Krugman:

 

 

That also still leaves the question of why presumably rational people Only ignoramuses continue to support this guy.

 

FYP

[Winstonm]

I do not think this has been emphasized enough: do we all realize that the only thing at this point standing between the rule of law and a totally autocratic Individual-1 who ignores any law he doesn't like is the SCOTUS with new appointees Gorsuch and Kavenaugh with say-so about the unitary executive theory?

 

This is getting down to the nut-cutting. Are we going to retain this republic as it has been or allow a corrupt party and leader to steal it?

[Winstonm]

Speaking of the president's tax returns, it seems to me the only two reasons to be truly frightened about their release would be if the cash expenditures (for things like the Scottish golf course, for which cash was paid) do not agree with income. That would tend to show either income tax evasion or money laundering, would it not?

 

 

Edit: Big story in the NYT about the taxes of Individual-1.

 

David Cay Johnston says this about the story:

 

 

NYT:

 

Newly obtained tax information reveals that from 1985 to 1994, Donald J. Trump’s businesses were in far bleaker condition than was previously known.

 

By RUSS BUETTNER and SUSANNE CRAIG

 

May 7, 2019

By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns.

 

Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.

 

The data — printouts from Mr. Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, for the years 1985 to 1994 — represents the fullest and most detailed look to date at the president’s taxes, information he has kept from public view. Though the information does not cover the tax years at the center of an escalating battle between the Trump administration and Congress, it traces the most tumultuous chapter in a long business career — an era of fevered acquisition and spectacular collapse.

 

The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.

 

In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.

[y66]

Guest post from Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

I apologize in advance, but I’m going to do some old-fashioned cranky blogging today. Because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell repeated something on Tuesday that I’ve heard one too many times.

 

In a speech on the Senate floor, McConnell was describing Democratic attitudes toward special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. He called it a "Groundhog Day spectacle" that amounted to "endlessly relitigating a two and a half-year-old election result" and a "last hope that maybe they'd never have to come to terms with the American people’s choice of a president."

 

It's true, of course, that the core subject of Mueller's probe involved the 2016 campaign; it’s also true that many Democrats have speculated that Russian interference in the election may have changed the result (and given the very close outcome, that's at least a plausible guess).

 

But, to be blunt, the only political actor who is obsessed with relitigating the 2016 election is President Donald Trump. Democrats certainly don't think that anything they do now can change that result. Even those who are set on impeaching and removing Trump presumably understand that Vice President Mike Pence would move into the Oval Office.

 

More to the point, for the purposes of judging the president’s conduct, it shouldn’t matter whether the election was close or whether any alleged misbehavior might have changed the result. That’s obvious from Watergate. No one seriously thought in 1974 that the crimes committed by President Richard Nixon’s campaign were responsible for his landslide victory over George McGovern. But the crimes were still taken seriously by all sides. No one claimed that Nixon’s victory somehow mitigated his misconduct.

 

Although Trump doesn’t appear to have committed any crimes during the campaign with respect to Russia, it does seem likely that he obstructed justice and otherwise abused his power while in office. Should Democrats – should citizens in general – not care about that because he won? And y et I see many Republicans, McConnell included, basically saying: The election is over, Trump is president, get over it – as though that’s a good reason to ignore serious accusations of wrongdoing.

 

Want to defend Trump? Go for it. Nothing wrong with that. Just defend him on the merits. Plenty of criticism of any president is partisan, and plenty of it is dead wrong – but you can't argue that it's wrong in principle to hold the president accountable for his actions. Perhaps my memory is distorted, but I don't remember similar defenses of previous presidents, Democrats or Republicans.

[Winstonm]

To the sycophants of Individual-1: you know, don't you, that Individual-1 is not acting tough right now; he is scared shiteless.

[barmar]

To the sycophants of Individual-1: you know, don't you, that Individual-1 is not acting tough right now; he is scared shiteless.

Why would someone who believes he's totally innocent and has been exonerated be so adamant about not turning over documents? If he's correct, they should support his case.

[johnu]

A Republican-led Senate committee subpoenaed Donald Trump Jr., and GOP members are furious

 

After Lying Mitch the Hypocrite McConnell declared the Dennison/Russia investigation was closed, the Republican majority Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Don Jr. back to the Hill to testify, presumably about his role in the Moscow Tower project and maybe the secret meeting with the Russians, both of which he apparently lied about and committed perjury in his last appearance.

 

"Apparently the Republican chair of the Senate Intel Committee didn't get the memo from the Majority Leader that this case was closed …," Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wrote on Twitter.

 

I didn't expect any better from whackjob Paul. Finding the truth, trying to protect the country from Russian election interference, trying to protect the country from the Manchurian President and Putin Puppet? 100% not important. Protecting a liar and corrupt Dennison who is working for Putin? Priceless!

[y66]

Quote of the day:

 

“Trump did not create the Republican Congress; the Republican Congress created Trump.” -- former Senate majority leader Harry Reid

[Winstonm]

Quote of the day:

 

From my understanding, the possibility of a demagogue winning a party's nomination can be traced back to Bobby Kennedy's assassination and the following 1968 Democratic convention where Hubert Humphrey, who did not run in a single primary, was chosen by the Democratic party brokers to be their nominee. This action so angered the anti-war Democrats that the police were called onto the convention floor, while outside the convention police and protesters collided in bloody and violent attacks.

 

After this disaster, the call for open and more democratic methods of choosing a nominee led to increased emphasis on the primary vote as binding on delegates took off with today's methods the end result.

[johnu]

Trump Ghostwriter Charles Leerhsen Says President Was Bad At Business

 

No surprise to anybody who reads or watches real news. Viewers of the Fox Propaganda Network should ignore this and remain blissfully ignorant.

 

But Trump’s portfolio did not jibe with what I saw each day — which to a surprisingly large extent was him looking at fabric swatches. Indeed, flipping through fabric swatches seemed at times to be his main occupation. Some days he would do it for hours, then take me in what he always called his “French military helicopter” to Atlantic City — where he looked at more fabric swatches or sometimes small samples of wood paneling.

Somebody should send a couple of suitcases full of fabric swatches to the White House to take Dennison's mind off a trade war with China and military action in Iran B-)

 

Once during a lull I told him a story I thought he’d like to hear about how I had just taken the Trump Shuttle to Washington, and as we flew through a storm the plane had been struck by lightning. I commended the pilot for the way he handled the incident; he had gotten on the loudspeaker to tell the passengers what had happened and to reassure them.

 

But instead of being pleased to hear that, Trump, using the general number, immediately dialed the shuttle to demand to know why he hadn’t been informed about what had happened. Unfortunately it took about 10 rings before it was answered by a woman who said, “Good morning, Trump Shuttle.” By then he was purple with rage. “This ... is ... Donald ... Trump!” he growled. For the poor woman, it must have been like working at Popeye’s and getting a call from the sailor man himself. “Why did it take so long to answer this phone?” Trump demanded. Then, after bawling her out for a minute or two, he hung up abruptly, forgetting why he had called in the first place.

Dennison has a mind like a steel trap. Unfortunately it was left out in the rain and doesn't work anymore because it is completely rusted.

[y66]

From How California, Oregon and Washington are winning the fight against Trump’s hateful policies by Timothy Egan at NYT:

 

LOS ANGELES — A big crowd showed up for the festive unveiling of President Barack Obama Boulevard here last weekend, at the intersection of “hope and resistance,” as one news outlet put it. Sure, it’s just a three-and-a-half-mile stretch of road, a living ex-president’s name added to streets honoring Jefferson and Washington.

 

But the ceremony also marked the latest, and one of the most joyous, of the not-so-subtle ways in which the West Coast continues to live free and prosper under a president doing everything he can to hurt the 51 million Americans in the three lower-48 states that hug the Pacific shore.

 

President Trump hates the West Coast. He has called California “out of control” and boasted about “my sick idea” to dump migrants into the progressive cities in this time zone. Worst of all, his administration is actively working to take away health care from more than five million people in California alone.

 

He appears to have warmer feelings for Kim Jong-un, the thug who starves his own people — “We fell in love,” Trump once said of North Korea’s dictator — than for a majority of citizens under his rule on the West Coast. He has higher praise for a traitor and slaveholder, Robert E. Lee — “a great general” — than for the states working under a hostile administration without seceding from the union.

 

His energy and environmental policies would hasten the collapse of some of nature’s finest handiwork, from a pristine coastline that he tried to open to oil drilling, to forests that will soon be aflame again because the president will not do anything to stall climate change.

 

His trade war is a bullet that could wound the nation’s most trade-dependent state, Washington, which produces apples and wine and software and coffee and jetliners and trucks and global health care for the world.

 

To Trump, everything “Out West” is like occupied territory. Almost daily, he issues legal missives and executive orders intended in some way to make life worse on the West Coast.

 

But here’s the good news for E Pluribus Unum: He’s losing. Badly. The West Coast is crushing it against Trump. Using the law to fight a bully, the Constitution to challenge an authoritarian, and facts against Fox News-driven fantasy, California, Oregon and Washington have stalled some of the most despicable of Trump’s retrograde policies.

 

And this is the place to say that, yes, Trump loathes the rest of Blue America as well, and many of those states are on the front lines against Trump.

 

But this president has a particular strain of hatred within his tiny dark heart for the Pacific states. And they hate him back. After the wipeout in last year’s congressional elections, only a mere 38-mile strip of the Pacific shore in the lower 48 states, in Washington, remains in Republican hands.

 

In California and Washington, the ranks of the uninsured have fallen to record lows because of Obamacare. Would any other sitting president go out of his way to reverse that lifesaving progress? He recently directed his Justice Department to try to kill the entirety of the Affordable Care Act.

 

If the law stands, and the 133 million Americans with pre-existing conditions keep their legal protections, you can thank California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, for leading an aggressive coalition to defend Obama’s greatest legacy.

 

Federal judges have repeatedly sided with California against Trump on air pollution, toxic pesticides and oil drilling. In April, the Interior Department was forced to suspend a plan to drill off the Pacific shore. And a federal judge in Oregon has so far backed a far-reaching attempt to hold Trump’s government responsible for averting climate change.

 

West Coast governors have defied Trump’s ban on transgender Americans serving in the military; they’ve opened their National Guard ranks to the people Trump is trying to shun from service.

Washington’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, has filed 36 lawsuits against the Trump administration and has not lost a case. His first takedown of the tyrant halted, nationwide, the initial Muslim ban.

 

Last week, Trump went to bat for social media extremists and conspiracy theorists, issuing a warning to the Silicon Valley companies that are trying to banish the hatemongers: “We are monitoring and watching, closely!” Actually, they’re monitoring and watching him — closely. It’s, um, what they do in Big Tech.

 

Under Trump’s guidance, the United States is running up debt faster than one of his bankrupt casinos. It’s what he does. By contrast, California, after raising taxes on the rich and wages for the poor, after extending family leave and health care, is projecting a $21 billion budget surplus for the coming fiscal year.

 

Talent and capital can go anywhere. It’s drawn to the West Coast, because creativity doesn’t grow well in nurseries of fear and tired thinking. Washington was named the best state for business in 2017, and the best place for workers in 2018.

 

We’ll soon look west for a replacement for Trump. By moving their presidential primaries up to March, California and Washington have assured that the one-in-seven Americans who live in those two states will have an early say. It’s only fitting, given how much they’ve contributed to the fight against the Trump blight on the Republic.

Power to the people! Stick it to this dark hearted man!

[johnu]

MyPillow Lays Off 150 Workers After Praising Trump’s Tax Cuts, ‘Booming Economy’

 

MyPillow, one of the few remaining advertisers frequently featured on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, is laying off more than 100 employees not even a year after the company’s founder praised President Donald Trump for creating a “booming economy.”

“After more than 500 days with Donald Trump as our president — with record-low unemployment and a booming economy — it’s clear, Minnesota, that we can rest easy,” wrote Lindell in the op-ed.

[johnu]

Dennison's lack of understanding of tariffs costs Americans billions

 

Trump Trade War Just Raised Taxes On Consumers By Tens Of Billions of Dollars

 

“Tariffs are NOW being paid to the United States by China of 25% on 250 Billion Dollars worth of goods & products. These massive payments go directly to the Treasury of the U.S.,” Trump wrote on Twitter, repeating the false claim he made to reporters Thursday about “all of the tariffs that China has been paying us for the last eight months ― billions and billions of dollars.”

 

But that assertion, one that Trump has made in various forms dozens of times through the years, has no basis in fact.

 

“No, no, no. No! Not so. False. Wrong. Nuh-uh,” said Jared Bernstein, once the top economic adviser to former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden. “Tariffs are paid by the importing company who then typically tries to pass the tax off on consumers.

As far as the importing companies passing the tariff costs on to consumers

 

Trump's Washing Machine Tariffs Cleaned Out Consumers

 

President Donald Trump's tariffs on washing machines resulted in consumers paying an extra 12 percent, on average, to buy a new dryer last year, new data show.

 

Yes, you read that correctly. Tariffs on imported washing machines ended up increasing not only the retail price of washing machines but dryers too—despite the fact that dryers were not subject to the new import taxes imposed by the Trump administration in January 2018. Research from a trio of economists at the University of Chicago and the Federal Reserve show that retailers made the decision to hike the price of both washing machines and dryers (since they are frequently bought together) after the tariffs took effect.

LOL, the tariffs on washing machines gave cover to dryer companies to raise prices even though they didn't have to pay tariffs on dryers.

[johnu]

Ocasio-Cortez compares GOP to Dwight from 'The Office'

 

This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and “fact check” it. Like the “world ending in 12 years” thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal. But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows.

Obviously this goes a little overboard. I'm pretty sure that sea sponges are very fine people too.

[Winstonm]

We are inexorably moving toward a morally insolvent United States:

 

By Sherrilyn Ifill

 

Since April 2018, more than two dozen executive and judicial nominees have declined to endorse the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This week — one that marks the 65th anniversary of the landmark ruling that struck down legal apartheid in this country — the Senate is poised to confirm three of those judicial nominees to lifetime seats on the federal bench.

 

That is simply unacceptable.

 

Few of us — no matter our race, color or creed — would recognize our democracy or legal system without the changes touched off by this momentous civil rights case. For nearly 65 years, the legal consensus around Brown was unequivocal. With its transformational opinion eviscerating segregation and codifying the modern contours of equal justice, Brown remained above partisanship, ideology and everything else.

 

 

Even the most conservative judges affirmed its centrality to our nation’s democratic character. At his 2005 confirmation hearing, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. repeatedly affirmed his agreement with Brown. That same year, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. explained that Brown “vindicated what the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment was supposed to mean, which was to guarantee equal rights to people of all races.” Just last year, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh described Brown as the “single greatest moment in Supreme Court history.”

 

But in April 2018, Trump judicial nominee Wendy Vitter bucked more than a half-century of unanimity by failing to offer support for the Brown decision. In response to Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s (D-Conn.) request for her position, Vitter said, “I don’t mean to be coy, but I think I get into a difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions, which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with.” Judicial nominees such as Andrew Oldham, Neomi Rao and Michael Park followed Vitter’s lead.

 

This response simply doesn’t pass muster. The reluctance to speak about Brown cannot be explained by the rationale frequently offered by nominees who refuse to answer questions about Citizens United, for instance, namely that the case is one that might come back before the court. But no serious legal analyst thinks the issue of segregation will be relitigated ever again. In 2005, Roberts deemed Brown as unlikely to come back before the court as Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 case that established the principle of Supreme Court judicial review.

 

More recently, and more perplexingly, President Trump’s nominee for deputy attorney general also refused to answer the question. This is unprecedented territory for a Justice Department nominee during the Trump administration, and it appears to be new ground for a Justice Department nominee in any administration since the watershed decision. Jeffrey Rosen said he could not be expected to go through “thousands of Supreme Court opinions and say which ones are right and which ones are wrong.” But the deputy attorney general oversees the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, whose mandate is to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws and precedent, including Brown. We do, in fact, have a right to know his position.

 

So, what’s the real reason these executive and judicial nominees are suddenly demurring on Brown? The ugly truth is that declining to offer approval of Brown signals a willingness to question the project of democracy that Brown created — one in which African Americans and other marginalized groups compelled the federal courts to honor the spirit of equal justice embodied in the words of the 14th Amendment. And this isn’t just deeply troubling; it’s also downright dangerous.

 

Once positioned near the center of the canon of Supreme Court jurisprudence, it’s hard not to conclude that a move is afoot to move Brown to the margins. If distancing oneself from Brown becomes an accepted marker of conservative legal bona fides, something monumental will have shifted in American legal thinking and values.

 

But there has been little public outrage about this clearly orchestrated response by Trump nominees. That is a colossal mistake. Perhaps we have blown past so many norms and guardrails over the past two years that we have become numb to the onslaught. But we must awaken from this paralysis. This year, when so much is at stake, we must reclaim Brown. We must demand that all nominees to the federal bench offer their support of this central feature of the rule of law in the United States.

 

If we are to pass down to our children a system that will protect their rights for decades to come, we must reject nominees who reduce Brown to merely one among “thousands of Supreme Court opinions” rather than as a seminal case that anchors our very conception of modern American democracy.

 

Support for Brown should be regarded as a low bar to clear for any judicial or Justice Department nominee. That scores of Trump nominees have been confirmed despite a refusal to even approach this simple question is a shameful reminder of how far we have moved away from principles that once enjoyed broad consensus in this “new normal.” Nominees either support Brown, the rule of law and equality under the law, or they do not. And if they do not, they put our very democracy at risk.

[Zelandakh]

. The interviewer is Andrew Neil, regarded by many as the most right-winged voice on British political programming.

[awm]

. The interviewer is Andrew Neil, regarded by many as the most right-winged voice on British political programming.

 

Now that we live in Switzerland, we are watching quite a bit more BBC. Interviews on BBC are (in general) a lot more adversarial than interviews on US news media. American political figures are used to ignoring questions they don't like, talking over the interviewer, reciting canned talking points, and outright lying when the truth isn't favorable to their position. They are virtually never called on this by US journalists, who typically just move on to the next question. In comparison, BBC interviewers really attack the people they're interviewing and tend to call them on all of these behaviors, which explains some of what's going on in this particular interview. We find the BBC style much more informative and entertaining, although this would never work in the US with the myriad channels and no main "national news network" (an American interviewer who did these things would find it very difficult to get more interviews, since there are so many other options to get on TV).

[y66]

From A de Gaulle of Our Own -- "In search of a statesman with a certain idea of America" by Ross Douthat at NYT:

 

[Julian Jackson's] new biography of de Gaulle is relevant — in addition to just being educational, a sweeping-yet-concise introduction to the most brilliant, infuriating and ineffably French of men — because his grand project, his only consistent purpose apart from his own ambition, was a struggle to reintegrate the competing narratives of Frenchness, to get his country to transcend its ideological civil war.

 

De Gaulle was a man of the French right, associated from his earliest days with conservative institutions — the Catholic Church, the military — and right-wing and monarchist family traditions. But his particular style of nationalism, his extreme devotion to a “certain idea of France,” made him constantly inclined to seek a more inclusive nationalism — one that would lionize the military heroes of the ancien régime and the generals of the revolutionary period equally, let Joan of Arc live beside Marianne, and enable Paris's jostling, rivalrous monuments, Catholic and Bourbon and Republican and Bonapartist, to share the city rather than dividing it.

 

As with any reinvention of tradition there was an artificiality to Gaullism, a deliberate submerging of many important controversies, a mythmaking about national “grandeur” that dodged as many questions as it answered. Unsurprisingly, it somewhat disappointed its perpetually disappointed leader, who felt that the France he forged was less than he had hoped — less conservative in its culture, less ambitious and effective in its policy, less glorious than the France of his imagination. And like any such project, it was provisional, bequeathing buried tensions that in today’s France are being increasingly exhumed.

 

But compared with other efforts at statesmanship in long-divided countries, it had enduring effects without requiring disastrous bloodshed. “Gaullism succeeded,” Jackson writes, “in becoming the synthesis of French political traditions, or as de Gaulle put it, reconciling the left to the state and the right to the nation, the left to authority and the right to democracy.” That synthesis required rejection as well as inclusion, with enemies to both the right and left — the Communists to one side, the Vichyites and eventually the betrayed Algerian colonials to the other. It required cynicism and compromise, a blitheness about constitutional niceties and a cult of personality. But it established a unity out of deep division that could not have been anticipated in 1940.

 

Of course that raises the question of whether anything like Gaullism would have been possible without the total French collapse in that dark year, which simultaneously established de Gaulle as the unconquered embodiment of a conquered nation and discredited, through the stain on Vichy, elements of the right that might have more successfully opposed him. If the lesson of Gaullism for today’s America is that to escape an ideological civil war you first need to be conquered by Nazis, then it’s not a particularly encouraging case study.

 

But even with that caveat, I would still hand Jackson’s biography to any politician who imagines breaking out of our 50-50 politics and governing as a national rather than a tribal figure. What it suggests, above all, is the centrality of narrative and imagination to successful statesmanship, and the extent to which it’s possible for a very unusual sort of politician to effectively reinvent tradition, synthesize from conflict, and persuade many millions of people to go along with it.

 

And it also suggests the importance of a Gaullist question for our would-be leaders: What is your certain idea of America? And how many Americans, and how much of American history, would your idea be able to include?

Good question Ross.

[Winstonm]

For anyone who still doesn't believe how close we are to losing our country to a radical minority, I submit these seemingly unrelated items:

 

A)

In 1992, the Supreme Court looked poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark case protecting abortion rights. They didn’t, however, and the main reason was respect for precedent—specifically, the legal doctrine known as stare decisis, or “let the decision stand.”

 

Hyatt was, in large part, about stare decisis. A 1979 Supreme Court case, Nevada v. Hall, held that citizens can sue a state in another state’s court. In 1998, Gilbert Hyatt did just that as part of a tax dispute, with tens of millions of dollars at stake. This week, the court overruled its 1979 decision by a vote of 5-4 and tossed out Hyatt’s claim. The split was on ideological lines, with the court’s five conservatives in the majority and four liberals in the minority.

 

B)

Attorney General William Barr assigned a federal prosecutor to examine the origins of the Russia investigation, The New York Times reports. John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, was reportedly tapped to look into how the probe—which culminated in the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report—started in the first place. President Trump has called for this investigation, claiming the probe was an “illegal takedown that failed” and proclaiming that “somebody’s going to be looking at the other side.

 

 

C)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has never shied away from rubbing shoulders with leaders more typically kept at a distance by the West, and his Oval Office meeting Monday with Hungary's far right-leaning prime minister was only the latest example of his engagement with strongmen.

 

Like Trump, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has espoused hard-line anti-migration rhetoric. The president described his guest this way: "Probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that's OK. That's OK. You've done a good job and you've kept your country safe."

 

D) How Democracies Die chapter 4, Subverting Democracy:

 

To better understand how elected autocrats subtly undermine institutions, it's helpful to imagine a soccer game. To consolidate power, would-be authoritarians must capture the referees, sideline at least some of the other side's star players, and rewerite the rules of the game to lock in their advantage, in effect tilting the playing field against their opponents.

 

The way I view it, American democracy in our two-party system is like a marriage. To make it work, each side must commit to making the marriage superior to individual desires. In our current environment, we are much closer to divorce than to a stable marriage. And as anyone who has undergone the process knows, there are no winners in divorce. A house divided more often than not goes into foreclosure.

[Winstonm]

Ain't this grand? WaPo reports:

 

In the weeks before they were ousted last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and top immigration enforcement official Ronald Vitiello challenged a secret White House plan to arrest thousands of parents and children in a blitz operation against migrants in 10 major U.S. cities.

 

According to seven current and former Department of Homeland Security officials, the administration wanted to target the crush of families that had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border after the president’s failed “zero tolerance” prosecution push in early 2018. The ultimate purpose, the officials said, was a show of force to send the message that the United States was going to get tough by swiftly moving to detain and deport recent immigrants — including families with children.

 

The sprawling operation included an effort to fast-track immigration court cases, allowing the government to obtain deportation orders against those who did not show for their hearings — officials said 90 percent of those targeted were found deportable in their absence. The subsequent arrests would have required coordinated raids against parents with children in their homes and neighborhoods.

 

But Vitiello and Nielsen halted it, concerned about a lack of preparation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the risk of public outrage and worries that it would divert resources from the border.

 

Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller and ICE Deputy Director Matthew Albence were especially supportive of the plan, officials said, eager to execute dramatic, highly visible mass arrests that they argued would help deter the soaring influx of families.

 

The arrests were planned for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and the other largest U.S. destinations for Central American migrants. Though some of the cities are considered “sanctuary” jurisdictions with police departments that do not cooperate with ICE, the plan did not single out those locations, officials said.

 

So this must be fake news, too? So this had nothing to do with Vitiello and Nielsen being fired, either, I guess?

 

Despite the fact that it was strongly supported by Stephen Miller and described as a "half-baked idea" which lends strong credibility to the reporting.

[cherdano]

Now that we live in Switzerland, we are watching quite a bit more BBC. Interviews on BBC are (in general) a lot more adversarial than interviews on US news media. American political figures are used to ignoring questions they don't like, talking over the interviewer, reciting canned talking points, and outright lying when the truth isn't favorable to their position. They are virtually never called on this by US journalists, who typically just move on to the next question. In comparison, BBC interviewers really attack the people they're interviewing and tend to call them on all of these behaviors, which explains some of what's going on in this particular interview. We find the BBC style much more informative and entertaining, although this would never work in the US with the myriad channels and no main "national news network" (an American interviewer who did these things would find it very difficult to get more interviews, since there are so many other options to get on TV).

I don't think "attack" is really the right word for it. In some sense, they are giving the interviewee the opportunity to thoroughly argue for their position from first principles by contrasting their view with the opposite one. Imagine asking Elisabeth Warren "Isn't the threat of breaking up big banks/tech companies/... destroying the entrepreneurial spirit that makes America great?" - she'd relish the chance to explain how she arrived at this position, and what really drives her politics.

 

The problem of course is that this exposes the fraud that is Ben Shapiro. Since he is apparently good at winning debates with random college students, he thinks of himself as this intellectual philosophical giant, when in fact he cannot rigorously defend any of his views when questioned about them from a mildly surprising angle.

[Chas_P]

:

The way I view it, American democracy in our two-party system is like a marriage. To make it work, each side must commit to making the marriage superior to individual desires. In our current environment, we are much closer to divorce than to a stable marriage. And as anyone who has undergone the process knows, there are no winners in divorce. A house divided more often than not goes into foreclosure.

 

Well said Winston. I agree.